


Grow Old With You

by msred



Series: Starting Over [37]
Category: American (US) Actor RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Aging, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Innuendo, Married Couple, Married Life, Red Carpet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27159701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msred/pseuds/msred
Summary: I frowned at my reflection in the full-length mirror, huffing out a heavy exhale at the reflection frowning back.“What’s that face?” he asked, eyebrows knitted together as he pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room to stand right behind me.“I’m old,” I pouted as his hands closed around my shoulders. He scoffed.“Babe, I’m in my 50s.”I scoffed right back. “You turned 50 five months ago.”
Relationships: Chris Evans (Actor) & Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor) & Reader, Chris Evans (Actor) & You, Chris Evans (Actor)/Original Female Character(s), Chris Evans (Actor)/Reader, Chris Evans (Actor)/You
Series: Starting Over [37]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1423663
Comments: 16
Kudos: 44





	Grow Old With You

_ 10 years, 10 months together; 9 years, 5 months married; 6 years, 4 months post-adoption (November, Year 12) _

I frowned at my reflection in the full-length mirror, huffing out a heavy exhale at the reflection frowning back. My hair and make-up were impeccable, skin glowing and eyes sparkling and my hair cascading in long waves down my back and over one shoulder, a beautiful vintage pearl barrette pinning it back just above my right ear to make sure it kept its asymmetrical arrangement. My dress, which one of the members of the prep team had laid out artfully on the bed behind me, was also perfect. It was a deep, deep blue silk, almost purple in the right light, with an off-the-shoulder neckline and gently flowing skirt with a slit so far up the right thigh it  _ almost  _ made me uncomfortable, and the material hung and moved in a way that almost gave the impression that I was walking through flowing water. Even my shoes were perfect, ivory pearl-embellished Jimmy Choo stiletto sandals that would have my feet aching 20 minutes into the night but that would look great (and make my leg look great) through that slit. They would also bring me to only a couple inches below Chris’s height, which he’d teased would make it so much easier for me to hang off his shoulder and kiss his cheek for all those ‘adoring wife’ pictures. (It would also make it easier for him to whisper dirty, embarrassing things in my ear throughout the night.)

All of those things were great, and once I was dressed, I knew I’d actually be pretty happy with the way I looked. But standing there in front of that unforgiving glass in just a pair of thin, seamless panties (the dress wasn’t tight or clingy, but it had taken a lot of tries to find a pair of underwear that didn’t create an outline in some way or catch the fabric as it flowed over them when I walked or turned), my strapless bra sitting in the armchair just to my right, all I could see were all the ways my body had changed over the last several years. I resisted the urge to groan when I thought about how different I looked from the first time Chris had seen me naked, for example.

Speaking of Chris, I heard a low whistle from the doorway between the bedroom and the hotel suite’s living room just as I started to reach for my bra. “Wow.” My eyes went back to the mirror, ignoring my own reflection, and I saw him over my shoulder, leaning on the doorway. His tie hung around his neck untied, the top two buttons of his dress shirt and both sleeves still undone and shirttails hanging outside his suit pants. His right ankle hooked over his left as his right shoulder pressed into the doorframe, and as my eyes landed on him he stuffed both hands into his pockets. Even as I gave him an eye roll that would rival our 13-year-old son’s, I felt a flush start at my neck and a fire ignite in my belly. I may not have been happy with the way  _ I  _ looked, but I had nothing but good things to say about him. Over a decade in and he was still the sexist thing I'd ever laid eyes on. 

“What’s that face?” he asked, eyebrows knitted together as he pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room to stand right behind me.

“I’m old,” I pouted as his hands closed around my shoulders. He scoffed.

“Babe, I’m in my 50s.” 

I scoffed right back. “You turned 50 five months ago.”

“Exactly.” He bent to press his lips to the juncture of my neck and shoulder on my right side where my hair was pinned back, leaving the long expanse of skin from just below my ear to the curve of my shoulder exposed. 

“Yes, exactly.” I stepped away from him and turned to face him. “And you look like that.”

“Like what?” Bless his heart, he truly didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at. His whole,  _ I’m just a big meatball dork at heart. Heartthrob? No. Ha, you should see me first thing in the morning,  _ act had always seemed like just that, an act, at least a little bit. But I’d known him for over 11 years, and we’d been married for over nine, and in that time I’d learned that even as he goofed around flexing and showing off his physical strength, he really just did not realize the effect he had on people. Or how absolutely, phenomenally delicious he always looked.

I stepped a little to one side and turned so that I stood at a right angle to both him and the mirror before reaching with the hand closest to him and pulling up his shirt to a few inches above the waistline of his pants. “Like that,” I told him, looking into the mirror and eyeing the smooth, tight skin stretched taut over flat abs and the dark, thin trail of hair disappearing beneath his fly.

He rolled his eyes and grabbed my wrist, pulling me back in front of him. “Yeah, and you look,” he curled his hands around my hips and rested his chin on my shoulder, “like that,” he almost whispered before turning his head to press his lips to my neck. He managed to get in a few solid open-mouthed kisses, working his way up toward my ear, before I could pull away.

“I’m serious,” I said quietly. His hands had started working their way up my ribs toward my breasts, but he stopped and brought them back down to my hips then crossed them over my lower abdomen until his arms were wrapped around me.

He frowned and pressed his cheek to the side of my head, careful to find the spot just behind my temple where my hair was already smoothed back and held tight by the barrette so that he didn’t mess anything up. “What’s going on?”

I let my eyes fall closed and shook my head. I shouldn't have said anything. I hadn't  _ meant  _ to say anything. But he walked in before I realized he was there, and he was so good at reading me. "Nothing," I told him. "It's not a big deal and we don't have time for this right now."

"Hey," he squeezed the soft flesh just above my hips in both hands, making me flinch and tense. "If something’s bothering you, it's not nothing. And we can make time."

"Um, no. We have a car service on the way and a red carpet to get to."

He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, "So we'll be late."

I pinched the back of one of his hands, between his thumb and forefinger. "I don't think that'll fly, Mr. Director."

Despite having been saying it was something he wanted to 'get into’ for nearly 20 years, Chris hadn't actually directed anything in almost 17. The film premiering that night was only his second, and it was good. Not like,  _ sweet, light and fluffy but entertaining romance story  _ good, but like,  _ holy shit what did I just watch?  _ good. He’d had me read the script right after he read it, and the dialogue and story were like something out of a Fitzgerald novel. The characters were deep and complex and flawed and captivating and the cast was brilliantly talented. I hadn’t actually seen the final cut yet, but all he had to do for it to be incredible was not make it worse, and I knew my husband and I’d listened to many of his ideas for the film, and I had complete faith that he could only have made it even better than it was on the page.

“It’s not like they can start without me,” he wiggled his eyebrows.

“We both know that’s not how it works.” We also both knew his anxiety would go through the roof if there was even a chance he was going to mess up the meticulously planned premiere, but he was going to ignore that part in favor of trying to get me to tell him what was up with me.

He stood up a little straighter and took half a step back and moved his hands to grip my upper arms. “Look,” he said completely seriously, “we’re not going anywhere until you tell me what’s wrong. Period.”

I rolled my eyes at myself then squeezed them shut, puffing out my cheeks then blowing out all the air. When I opened my eyes again he was still just looking at me through the mirror, one eyebrow just slightly higher than the other, waiting. “I’m old,” I said softly, “and everything’s just  _ softer _ , and  _ lower _ , than it used to be. I just,” I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip for a second, “wish I looked better. For you.”

I was happy with the way I looked, mostly. Time and age (and marriage to a wonderful man who’d never hesitated to shower me with attention and affection and support) had brought with them perspective and wisdom and maturity. Much of the insecurity I’d struggled with as a younger woman had been pushed aside to make room for those other, more productive, qualities, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still rear its ugly head on occasion. And at that moment, my  _ not bad for 46  _ body didn’t feel nearly adequate to walk a red carpet on the arm of my  _ 50, but puts most 30-year-olds to shame  _ husband.

“Okay,  _ first  _ of all,” his voice was exasperated-sounding and a little short, but his eyes were soft as they met mine in the mirror. His hands moved slowly down my arms, pulling them apart and away from my body where I’d wrapped them around myself. “Between Combat, weight conditioning, yoga, hiking, and walking with Brody and Banjo, you spend more time working out than I do.” Once he had my arms hanging at my sides he started trailing his fingertips up them. He’d made it from the backs of my hands to my shoulders already and was working his way back down, the smooth, light touch relaxing me so that my shoulders pulled slowly away from my ears as he spoke. “You’re fit,” he paused talking until his fingers reached my wrists then started working his way back up, “and healthy, and  _ strong _ ,” he closed his hands around my biceps and squeezed as if to prove his point. “You’re in awesome shape.”

I managed a small smile back at his reflection and he leaned forward to kiss my hair just above my right ear. “Now, second of all,” he continued to speak quietly just above my ear, releasing my arms and sliding his hands back down them. He covered my right hand with his, sliding his fingers between mine and closing them so that I did the same, but when his left hand got to mine, he curled it around the side of my hand, slipping his fingers into my palm and running his thumb over my knuckles. “You somehow manage to do that while being a dedicated, hard-working teacher and thoughtful friend, and, most importantly, as far as I’m selfishly concerned,” his thumb caught on the sapphire standing tall out of the center of the ring he’d put on my finger nine and a half years earlier and moved it slowly side-to-side, “You’re a loving, supportive, present and active wife and mother.” I blushed and dropped my eyes, and he pressed his lips to my temple. When he went on, his voice was barely above a whisper and his breath washed over my skin as his lips moved across the shell of my year, “There’s not a day that goes by that the kid and I don’t realize exactly how blessed we are that you love us, that you chose  _ us _ .”

“Chris -”

“But here’s the thing,” he went on, ignoring my interruption and bringing his hands back to my hips, scraping his teeth lightly over my ear as he did, “while those first two things are roughly a million times more important than something stupid like the absolutely natural, normal process of your body changing with the passage of time,” he pressed his lips, slightly parted and a little moist, to the hollow behind my ear and moved his hands across my waist to wrap his arms around me, “they are also kind of irrelevant to our current situation.” I felt my brows knit together and I tilted my head a little away from him, looking at him curiously in the mirror. His sincere, plaintive expression was replaced by an almost hungry-looking smirk as he tugged me back against him so abruptly that I stumbled a little and fell against the solid wall of his body. 

“Whatever imaginary imperfections you think you see, I don’t. I think you’re fuckin’ sexy as all hell.” He held me in place by my hips and pressed his own forward until I could feel the proof of his declaration pressing into my lower back. “You know what it does to me, seeing you like this?” He slid his left hand up my ribs until he cupped my right breast in his palm, his fingers curling around the side and dancing lightly over the highly sensitive skin and his thumb brushing deliberately back and forth over my quickly hardening nipple. His right hand drifted down, fingers tracing the waistband of my panties from one hip to the other before moving lower.

I couldn’t deny that I had a hard time finding those issues that had bothered me so much just a few minutes earlier when I watched our reflections in the mirror, a soft pink blush spreading outward from the center of my chest, my lips slightly parted and my chest rising and falling slowly with my heavy, deliberate breaths. He was draped over me, his body all but enveloping mine as his hands moved over my skin and his lips marked a path from behind my ear down my neck and across my shoulder. His hips ground into me again, moving in a slow circle, so that I felt the hard line of his dick against the small of my back. I loved the way we looked together, the knowledge of the reaction I was able to evoke in him.

“Chris,” I breathed, “the time -”

“I know,” his lips moved over the curve of my neck and shoulder, his fingers moving in small circles over my panties just above the juncture of my thighs. He worked a foot between mine and used it to nudge my legs a few inches farther apart. “The car will be here in 10 minutes.” His actions seemed to contradict his words as he slid his hand lower to pet between my legs, his fingers moving slowly and carefully from the top of my slit down to my entrance, then pressing just a little harder when they came back up. “I just wanted to make sure you know how much you turn me on, shut up that pesky negative voice in your head.”

“You’ve made that very clear,” I told him, and that time it was my hips that moved, arching my back to push back against him and making his fingers tense against me for a second. “But that doesn’t explain what your hands are doing.”

“Oh, this?” He rolled my nipple between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand at the exact same time that he pressed the middle finger of the right between my folds to find my clit, still with the barrier of my underwear between his skin and mine, making me jump. “Just returning the favor.”

My hands flew to his wrists, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually pull his hands from my body. “These are the only underwear I have with me that I can wear with my dress,” was the only protest I could manage.

“You gotta learn to be more prepared, baby,” he murmured low into my ear before taking the lobe between his lips and sucking gently. He rubbed a small circle around my clit and hooked his pinkie into the side of my panties like he was going to pull them away from my skin, then suddenly and abruptly released my ear, dropped both hands from my body, and took a step back. “But you were right,” he adjusted himself gingerly in his dress pants, “we really do need to finish getting ready.” He smacked my ass as he backed farther away then shot me a wink through the mirror before turning on his heel to leave the room, closing the door behind him as he did. I was left alone, turned on, and naked, except for a pair of uncomfortably sticky panties.

I wanted to be angry, but other emotions took priority. The fact of the matter was, he’d achieved his goal. It was impossible for me to feel insecure about the way I looked when I looked at us together, and felt the effect I had on him. Unfortunately, however, that didn’t help the predicament I was in. I had two options, neither of them particularly desirable. On the one hand, the idea of going to a red carpet premiere, with all the cameras and attention that came with it, without underwear was a little terrifying. But on the other hand, the thought of spending the entire night in the panties he’d managed to soak through was no less unappealing. I took in my reflection again, sighing and shaking my head when I saw the darkened spot on the front of the thin fabric. Shit. Well, several people, from Ashley to Valerie to the stylist who helped me out the one time a year or so that I needed to get red carpet ready to the prep team who’d been there earlier to tend to my hair and makeup, had been suggesting this from the beginning anyway.  _ Who knows,  _ I thought, looking my reflection in the eye and planting my hands on my hips,  _ it might be fun.  _

Roughly three minutes later I walked out of the bedroom fully dressed, aside from the zipper that I’d only pulled halfway up my back. I held my hands, fingers laced together and palms cupped, in front of my waist as I walked toward my husband, his shirt now tucked in, tie securely knotted around his neck, jacket on, completely ready to go except the shoes conspicuously missing from his feet.

“Wow,” his voice was low as he drew out the word. “I mean, I know I said that before, but it still applies.” 

I smiled sweetly at him when we were toe-to-toe. “Thank you.” He brought his hands up, cradling my face gently then pressing his lips to mine.  _ Good shoes,  _ I thought to myself when I realized I barely had to tilt my head back to kiss him as his tongue traced softly over the seam of my lips before he pulled away. He kissed the tip of my nose quickly before taking a step back.

“You ready to go?” The palms of his hands ran up and down my arms, my hands still folded together in front of me. 

“Almost. Zip me?” I turned and presented him with my semi-bare back.

“I’d rather  _ un _ zip you,” I glared at him over my shoulder and he smirked, “but sure.” I turned forward again and dropped my head forward, and a second later I felt his right hand curl around my shoulder, his left sweeping the hair that cascaded down my back over my left shoulder with the rest. He pressed soft kisses from the nape of my neck down to the base of it as his fingers dragged my zipper the rest of the way up. “Alright,” he kissed me one more time and followed it up with a soft bite, really just a scrape of his teeth across the top of my spine, then carefully resituated my hair.

I turned, careful of my shoes and my dress. “Thank you again.” I leaned forward to press a quick kiss to his lips. “Your shoes are in the bedroom, foot of the bed,” I told him. I’d seen them there when I lifted my dress off the bed to step into it. Apparently his shoes had gotten covered by the skirt when it was laid out so prettily before. I saw relief and just a little bit of embarrassment flash across his features as he smiled. He must’ve been afraid they were missing, and hoping I hadn’t yet noticed his socked feet. He kissed my forehead in thanks then turned to retrieve his shoes. “Hey honey,” I said sweetly, and he stopped and turned back to look at me expectantly. “Put this in my laundry bag for me?” I finally unclasped my hands and held one out, closed in a fist, and he looked back quizzically but held out his palm.

I dropped the small bundle of thin, dark fabric into his waiting hand. He just looked at it for a second, brow furrowed in confusion, then his eyes shot up to mine. “Is this-”

“Yep.”

“But I thought you said-”  
“Mmhmm.”

“So you’re not-”

“Nope.” His eyes grew to the size of silver dollars and I heard a small, strangled sound from the back of his throat. I smirked. “Chop chop, Mr. Director,” I teased, clapping my hands twice sharply in time with the words. Finally he turned, his eyes still lingering on me, trailing up and down my body, as he did. I heard him mumble something that sounded like  _ Not fuckin’ playing fair  _ as he disappeared into the bedroom.

By the time he came out a couple minutes later I was standing in the open doorway waiting for him. When he reached me I turned toward the hotel hallway and his hands fell heavy on my hips, moving none too subtly over the silk of my dress to feel what was - or wasn’t - under it. As the door closed behind us he leaned in, lips moving over my ear as he asked, “Do you think anyone will notice if the director and his wife leave early? Like, right after the opening credits?”


End file.
